Posted by Writing is such an essential activity these days. It holds so much importance for businesses, big or small. But it is never that easy. Many factors affect your ability to write and produce excellent results.
You’ve probably already tried one of these tips to overcome your writer’s block. Your thoughts are now flowing and the world seems alright again. Almost.
Now you need to make sure your thoughts are delivered to your audience in the best way possible. Your jumble of thoughts, emotions, and ideas need to be ironed out and dressed up for your audience.
Luckily, there are so many different tools used by writers and authors over the years. These are tools that can help you organize the clutter in your head and improve your writing.
Let’s take a look at these tools and you can choose any of these to help improve your writing skills.
1. FocusWriter
This is a distraction-free word processor. It keeps all possible distractions away by using a hide-away interface. Moving the cursor to the edges of the window will give you access to various tools and settings. You can change the theme as per your preference, or you can set daily goals to write. It also has on-the-fly updating statistics. The best part is whenever you open FocusWriter, it always comes back to what you were last working on. Your progress is saved and it’s ready for you to pick up where you left off.
2. Grammarly
This Chrome extension is so easy to use and so helpful. Grammarly helps in correcting spelling errors, grammatical errors, sentence structure, tone, etc. Though some of these features are only available on the upgraded versions. You can get real-time feedback from Grammarly on Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nearly everywhere else. Here you can see how Grammarly suggests edits for spelling and grammatical errors in their basic free plan.
And here you can see they have more suggestions for sentence structure and tone if you’re a Premium user.
3. Evernote
Evernote is a very good organizing tool used by executives, entrepreneurs and so many more. It allows you to note down, organize and arrange all your ideas. You can even use it as your Daily Journal if you prefer typing rather than writing in a physical journal. Whether you’re an experienced writer writing for a living or you just want to make a grocery list, Evernote is the way to go!
4. The NaNoWriMo Calculator
This calculator available on Omni tells you how much you should be writing in a day. It helps you ensure that you finish your task if it’s on a deadline. Here in the first section, you can add the number of words you’re supposed to write, fill in your start and end dates, add the number of words you wish to complete in a day. The second section needs the current date and the words you’ve completed so far. This section will also show you by when you’ll finish at the current rate.
The third section shows you if you’re on track or not. And the fourth section gives you an idea of how much more time you may need to finish your project.
5. BuzzSumo
This tool has many features but for writers specifically, it helps in researching your topic and how the audience has responded to other people who have written similar things. You’ll get Engagement statistics for different articles that have a similar theme. This will give you an idea of whether you should continue working on your selected topic or tweak a couple of things while sticking to the theme of your topic. Here you can see that the 1st article has the most engagement so it would make sense to write something around improving writing skills fast and easily.
6. Answer the public
This site is a superb topic-generating tool that helps you see the different options for topics to write based on your keywords. It visualizes search questions, fetches what people around the world have asked about your keyword, and then suggests topics, questions, statements, etc. Select keywords that are part of or relate to your theme and it’ll give you a wide range of potential topics around that or those keywords.
7. Hemingway
Like Grammarly, the Hemingway Editor helps in refining your content. It gives suggestions to make it better and improve readability. You can also use the tool to shorten your complex sentences and improve your writing style. This app is also a distraction-free writing tool so it’s more like a 2 in 1 app for writers. In the Hemingway App, you can see here that different colors denote different issues with your content. The blue indicates that you can omit or change your adverbs to ones that make you sound more confident with your content. The green suggests the use of active voice instead of passive. The purple indicates you can use a simpler alternative like ‘use’ instead of ‘utilize’. The yellow and red colors alert you that your sentences are too complex and long to read or understand.
8. Canva
Just because it’s not a writing app does not mean it can’t help you better your articles. This app has so many templates that you can use and you can also create your own images, banners, infographics, etc for your article. Visual content is so important for articles, projects, research papers, assignments, etc. Canva is super easy to use because of its drag-and-drop feature. All you need to do is look for a template that you’d like to use, drag it to the workstation, edit your text, images, or colors, and then once it’s ready you can download the file in .png, .jpg, .pdf. You can also create videos and gifs and use them for a more fun addition to your project.
9. Yoast
Yes, I did save the best for last! This WordPress Plugin is one of the best tools for writers on WordPress. It gives you so many tips for optimization. It analyses your content and lets you know if, where, and how you need to change something.
Here in the first image, you can see that the slug (editable part of the URL) and the meta-description both have a green light. This means that the keywords used and the lengths are most appropriate.
Yoast segregates its suggestions into 3 different categories — Good results, improvements, and problems.
Green pointers (Good results)
In the second image, the green pointers show you that the images, links, meta description length, and other things are all good to go.
Orange pointers (Improvements)
One of the things that need improvement is the key phrase in the introduction, wherein the key phrase and its synonyms appear in the 1st paragraph but not the same sentence. With this information, you can go back and edit your content accordingly.
Red pointers (Problems)
It lets you know solid problems with the post. In this example, the key phrase density is a problem. It also recommends the number of times the key phrase should appear based on the length of your post. It also recommends here that the key phrase or its synonyms be used in subheadings.
Most of these tools are either free or have free versions with options to upgrade and pay for more advanced features. Because they are all so easy to navigate through and understand, you can pick any 1 or 2 or all to help you with different projects you have lined up for you.
Let me know in the comments which of these have worked best for you! 😀
That’s all folks!
Thank you so much for curating this list! I am gonna check out the ones I don’t use.